In the old days, when most people had Newtonians on steel piers with thick cast aluminum or iron legs, we used to polar align by dragging the whole assembly all the time. Even without wheels. I don't think I've ever heard of a failure of one of these old mounts.

-Tim.

Tim,

I wasn't around in the old days but because I'm old I'll blame that... I didn't think pushing it about a bit would hurt but I won't be doing that again. Hate to have a repeat after the mount is out of warranty.

I decided it was worth $800 to try a mount that looked good on paper. If it were a tried and true mount with all the real world performance to back up the spec sheet, I'd have paid a lot more. A good reputation is harder to get than a bad one but is worth a lot.

Ya a few of us here did our best to try and talk you out of this. Sadly, for some of us, it was easy to see that this mount was likely destined for a world of hurt. For $800 you could have bought 2 second hand CG5's that have a better reputation, can be almost serviced with a hammer and duct tape and have better "real world" capacity to boot. Or for about the same price a second hand CGEM, also with a strong (mostly positive) reputation was also in reach.

But hey, someone had to be the pioneer with this mount. We are all learning from the experience of the early adopters. For what little consolation it is worth, thanks for taking the bullet on this one for some of us.

We should all take a collection and buy you a proper billet tripod top.

I don't work for Meade, don't own their stock and have very little invested in Meade products. I think you'd be hard pressed to call me a "fan boy".

We have evidence that two mount plates on a new product failed. We don't know how many have sold. We don't know if the manufacturing process had couple of random issues during startup that only came to light in use.

We do know that there are a lot of people here anxious to disparage American engineering, Meade for supposedly trying to supposedly save $1 on manufactured costs and wanting to give Meade no credit for replacing the damaged part under warranty at no cost to the customer.

If you read these forums long enough, and I have, you would never buy anything from Meade, never buy a CGEM or CGE, never buy a newer Vixen mount or an Ioptron.

The only thing to buy is a used CG5, oh wait, the periodic error is so huge and can't be corrected that its only good for visual, maybe.

That leaves only AP and, if you can't afford AP, well then you need a different hobby.